High M&A Demand For Analytics & Data Firms. Apparently.

ZDNet claim that the M&A market for analytics, data, business intelligence and machine learning companies is …hot.

They call it an All You Can Eat Buffet.

Consider the following acquisitions in the data and analytics world:

Salesforce acquired BeyondCore in 2016
Workday acquired Platfora, also in 2016
ZenDesk acquired BIME in 2015
Do you see a pattern? All three are SaaS providers; Salesforce covers the CPM space, Workday the Human Resources/Human Capital Management area and Zendesk focuses on customer service/experience and help desk implementations. Infor and all three of the above benefit from strong, native analytics functionality and none of them had it before the above acquisitions.

They go on to provide numerous other examples of acquisitions in this space.

But they fail to analyse any prices.

After all, what makes a market hot is not just number of transactions seen in isolation (and without comparison to numbers in other industries). What makes it hot is numerous buyers chasing after a limited number of targets and pushing prices up.

Maybe ZDNet know something I don’t. But they seem to like this story about hot activity in this sector. They like it so much that they made the same claims in 2014 and 2015. And 2012. And possibly before that.